31 entries categorized "Economy"

February 18, 2016

The week before the South Side Community Art Center's annual auction, I did this Common Ground show on black art suddenly become collectible. My guests were Philip Schiller, an art collector, Joe Clark, a gallery owner, Marva Pitchford Jolly, an artist and Herbert Nipson, the president of the South Side Community Art Center.

btw, Nipson was also the Executive Editor of Ebony Magazine and my old boss from 1972-74.

May 06, 2015

America's treatment of its urban Black youth has been anything but benign. Far too many of them have no jobs, no future and little to lose. Here's my take in the Chicago Defender.

Black teen unemployment comes with a price

By Monroe Anderson

This summer threatens to be long and hot. Not climate change hot but heated and angry, Baltimore Spring hot.

Three days ago, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll reported that 96 percent of us believe that there will be more racial disturbances as seen on TV.

After we see more episodes of police routinely showing up on the nightly news after they’ve killed yet another Black male, there will be more repeats of Black teens with little more than time on their hands and outrage on their minds acting out their frustration. We’ll see more squad cars stomped to death. More buildings going up in smoke. More stores ransacked and looted.

“A resounding 96% of adults surveyed said it was likely there would be additional racial disturbances this summer, a signal that Americans believe Baltimore’s recent problems aren’t a local phenomenon but instead are symptomatic of broader national problems,” the Journal reported.

That’s the Fourth Estate’s way of saying poor Black people are about to behave poorly and that while everybody knows it, not everybody knows why. So the opinions are about as racially divided as the nation. Sixty percent of Blacks saw the urban uprising as “long-standing frustrations about police mistreatment of African Americans,” while 58 percent of whites said the riots were "an excuse to engage in looting and violence.”

There are all sorts of evidence and reasons that underscore the Black interpretation while undermining the white one. There are also studies and events to inform us that the frustrations go far beyond the wanton and routine police killing of unarmed Black males to these core problems: No jobs, no hope.

There’s this year’s annual report released jointly by the Chicago Urban League and the Alternative Schools Network in January titled, “A Frayed Connection: Joblessness among Teens in Chicago,” revealed that In 2012-13, just one in ten of Chicago’s Black teens had a job--nine out of 10 did not.

“One half of 20-to 24-year old black male residents of the city are not working and not enrolled in school,” the report warned, adding that “Black teen employment rates in Chicago have reached historically low levels.”

A Kids Count policy report that was a dead ringer to the one in Chicago told the same sad story about young Black males in Baltimore in 2012, “unemployment among those ages 16 to 24 is the highest in the country since World War II.”

The Supreme Commander of the Allies during WWII, Dwight Eisenhower, in his farewell address as POTUS warned Americans about the future dangers of massive military spending, especially deficit spending and government contracts to private military manufacturers. The unemployed Black males are getting short-changed by the military-industrial complex Ike warned us about.

Less than two years after President Lyndon Johnson launched his ambitious War on Poverty in 1964, those resources were shifted to the war in Vietnam. A generation later, President Bill Clinton managed to downsize the military but Republicans later took their pound of flesh, forcing him to end the Summer Youth Employment and Training Program as a stand-alone initiative which resulted in 600,000 kids being laid off.

The bulk of today’s economic challenges in our urban areas can be traced directly back to President George W. Bush. The 43rd president’s surplus-busting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which were never in his administration’s budget, sucked up much of the tax dollars that had been returning to the cities and states.

Depending on who’s calculating those two wars have cost America between four and six trillion dollars. American commanders handed out $3.5 billion with next-to-nothing oversight to purportedly to rebuild the country we illegally invaded.

Meanwhile, back at home, our pavements feel like something out of a war zone. Our outdated bridges are in danger of collapsing. Our transportation system is last millennium. And, of course, our urban areas are teeming with Black men who want and need jobs that they can’t get.

In Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel is making jobs available for 24,000 Chicago teens through his One Summer Chicago initiative. In the scheme of things, that’s not a big number.

Maybe all those other unemployed teens, will understand it’s the thought that counts. We’ll see soon enough. Summer is just around the corner.

April 08, 2015

Mayor Rahm Emanuel reeled inthe Black vote, assuring that he'd get a second term. We delivered. This next term this is what I think he should do for us--as I discuss in my Chicago Defender column.

The Mayor's to-do list for his second term

Monroe Anderson

Defender Columnist

Thanks to Black Chicagoans voting against their our own interests, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, with a double-digit lead, will have four more years to oversee who gets the wheat and who gets the chaff. In his first four years, the mayor put a lot of time and energy into taking care of the Loop and those who either did business or resided there.

Now that he’s got that tied down, I suggest the mayor slip outside the Loop and attend to the rest of Chicago. I’ll even try to give him some of those specifics that Emanuel’s attack ads and debate talking points demanded from challenger Jesus “Chuy” Garcia.

To be exact, I’d like to talk about Bronzeville.

Back when candidate Rahm Emanuel was one of many hopefuls during the mayoral debate sponsored by the Chicago Defender, I asked him if, as mayor, he would use Tax Increment Financing, or TIFs, as they were intended to be used--as a means to kick start economic development in neighborhoods that could use it the most--or if he’d use them as Mayor Richard M. Daley had used them--as his handy slush fund.

Candidate Emanuel gave the right answer, promising he’d use them for the good of all Chicago. Mayor Emanuel, like the mayor before him, uses TIFs to take care of those communities and businesses that hardly need a helping hand.

There’s the $500,000 TIF that’s been set aside to rescue that economically distressed neighborhood surrounding McCormick Place. Using funds that could have travelled a mile or so further south along the lakefront, the mayor could have spurred development Black businesses that would not only have provided Bronzeville with much-needed good and services but would have seeded Black entrepreneurship in the process.

That didn’t happen. Instead, the money is going to the economically-disadvantage Marriott Corporation so that it can build a 1,200-room hotel right next door to a DePaul University basketball stadium. This plan was hatched even as the mayor was closing down 50 public schools in Black and brown neighborhoods because, he assured us, the city couldn’t afford to keep them up. The scheme was so outrageous that even students on DePaul’s Lincoln Park canvas protested to no avail.

Other dollars directed by the mayor has been better targeted to Black communities where they can make a difference. Mount Sinai Hospital on the city’s West Side is getting $31 million in TIF money. Whole Foods, the grocery chain frequently referred to as Whole Paycheck because it costs more to have organic foods, is getting $10.7 million in TIFs to build a new store in Englewood. A. Finkl & Sons, a specialty metal producer which was formerly in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood before moving to a 44-acre site on 93rd street, received $22.5 million in TIFs to help finance the move.

In all three of these deals, Mayor Emanuel’s use of TIFs undoubtedly will result in more jobs for some in the Black community. But all three business enterprises are white-owned and operated, guaranteeing that when it comes to commerce in Chicago, while folks will still remain ahead.

There are ways that the mayor can pay back all the Black Chicagoans who so slavishly gave him their votes: Invest in the Bronzeville, assuring that Black entrepreneurs are seeded so that they can grow thriving Black businesses. Rather than spoon feed the Black community with penny-ante social services and welfare deals, Mayor Emanuel can use TIF funds and his one percent pals to develop business partnerships where Black businessmen can eventually take over.

Here’s one specific example for the mayor. Since he took office, Rahm has pushed tourism as a major source of business development for the city. Right at 35th Street, in the landmark Supreme Liberty Life Building that was the longtime headquarters of the first African-American owned and operated insurance company in the northern United States, sits The Black Metropolis Convention & Tourism Council.

For $500,000, a mere fraction of what he’s given to Whole Foods to move into Englewood, Mayor Emanuel can help fund an organization, which doesn’t need to move anywhere, in taking visitors on tours that teach them about the history of Bronzeville.

There are other investments I’ll pull the mayor’s coattails to in the future. Four years from now, should he decide he’d like to another term, he should know and Chicago’s Black voters should know, what he’s done for them and what he’s been doing to them.

He wasn’t supposed to be there. All bets were on Emanuel brushing aside his four much lesser-known challengers in one fell swoop during the Feb. 24 general election.

Why wouldn’t he?

Emanuel had promise that turned into a portfolio. He was the finance director for mayoral candidate Richard M. Daley in 1989 and presidential candidate Bill Clinton in 1992. He became a multimillionaire Wall Street investment banker before returning to Chicago to win Rod Blagojevich’s U.S. House seat. In 2009 he resigned his congressional post to become President Barack Obama’s first chief of staff.

Five days before last month’s general election, Obama returned the favor by cutting a radio ad endorsing Emanuel and flying into Chicago to stump for his former badass buffer while designating the city’s Pullman Historic District a national monument. Mayoral candidate Emanuel also had a campaign war chest that was in the double-digit millions.

None of that was quite enough. Emanuel was too much the unlikable mayor, so the city’s voters didn’t like him back. He fell 4.4 points short of the 50 percent-plus-one votes needed to avoid a runoff.

So there Emanuel sat at Thursday night’s debate, side by side with challenger Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, taking incoming flak from the man he’d bested in the first match 10 days earlier. There he sat, in this second debate, watching Garcia make a comeback by interrupting him, deriding his first four years as the city’s chief executive and even laughing at his carefully crafted mayoral message.

Garcia’s credentials were not nearly as impressive as Emanuel’s. Garcia was not even a millionaire and had no prospect of becoming one. He was a mere Cook County commissioner, a former Illinois state senator and city alderman. He was basically a community organizer daring to challenge the up-and-comer who had definitely become ... da mayor.

In the run up to last month’s general election, the Emanuel campaign spent nearly $7 million on 4,600 TV attack ads defining Garcia as the not-ready-for-the-big-time candidate. The heavy barrage has continued with TV spots attacking Garcia’s nonspecific solutions to Chicago’s $20 billion in unfunded pension debt. The mayor’s positive TV ads presented Emanuel all dressed down, wearing a Mr. Rogers sweater while admitting that sometimes he’s been a jerk but that he’s been a jerk for the good of Chicago.

The TV ads were worth every million. Polls indicate that Emanuel has shifted from a too-close-to-call status to a double-digit lead.

And yet the mayor still had to debate this interloper. Garcia, who comes off like the guy you give a big hug to right before he asks you to all hold hands and sway as you sing “Kumbaya,” was being annoyingly on the offense. The commissioner stuck with his populist rallying points, insisting that he would be a mayor who listened to the people, while Emanuel hadn’t a clue what the voters wanted or needed. Garcia charged that Emanuel wasn’t nearly as good a financial manager as his campaign claimed: If so, why was Chicago’s bond rating downgraded last month to two notches above junk status?

Emanuel still possesses all the no-nonsense, show-me-the-money charm of the Wall Street banker he once was; therefore, he is nothing if not disciplined. So he sat there, attentively listening as Garcia charged that his allowing movie mogul George Lucas to build an interactive museum on 17 valuable acres of free lakefront land was a “monument to Darth Vader.”

It had to bug Emanuel, framing a smile and acting civil throughout much of the debate, that like Garcia, the progressives in his political party were characterizing him as a mayor who could not care less for the little people, simply because he quid-pro-quoed his corporate contributors big privatization contracts. Too many in Chicago were beginning to refer to him as Mayor 1%, just like the book with the same title.

Rahm sat during the hour long debate, methodically sticking to his script. Sure, he closed 50 schools in poor black and Hispanic neighborhoods, but “our kids have a full school day of kindergarten,” he said. Sure, he closed half the city’s mental clinics, but “we added more spaces through federally qualified entities.”

Between the school and health-clinic closings, Chicago’s black voters aren’t as crazy about Emanuel as they were four years ago. The Rev. Jesse Jackson and many of the city’s other black leaders are going with Garcia. Fortunately, Emanuel invested wisely in some key black ministers, politicians and businessmen. They may well balance out the decisive black vote that will determine the winner.

When the debate ended, it was two down and one to go. The last one is tomorrow. The election is April 7. After that, the mayor can wave goodbye and become himself again.

Cybercolumnist Monroe Anderson is a veteran Chicago journalist who has written signed op-ed-page columns for both the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times and executive-produced and hosted his own local CBS TV show. He was also the editor of Savoy Magazine. Follow him on Twitter.

February 11, 2015

If anything can that raise a Republican’s ire almost as much as a Black man in the White House, it’s labor unions.

So few should have been surprised when the new Republican governor of Illinois, Bruce Rauner, came up with an ingenious initiative to further weaken the state’s labor unions.

During last week’s State of the State address, Rauner said he would like to see “empowerment zones” in counties across the state where voters would decide whether unions could exist and workers should be obligated to pay associated dues. Given the governor’s party affiliation and the fact that he’s a one percenter, it’s easy to guess who he is zeroing in on empowering and who he’s zoning out.

Making the standard-issue, corporation-coddling Republican argument that the smaller the union presence, the greater the number of jobs, on Monday, Rauner signed Executive Order 15-13, which denies labor the right to deduct dues from state employees who benefit from union activities but don’t want to pay to support them.

As our newly constituted Congress is reaffirming, Republicans may be lousy at governing but they are masters of code wording, dog whistling and name-calling.

When the GOP set out to do some serious union busting by stripping organized labor of its funding, power and influence, for example, the words destruction and dismemberment were spoken mainly in quiet rooms while those southern states and Midwestern ones where Republicans ruled went about their dirty deeds. Instead, Republicans insisted these would be “right-to-work” states.

Rauner is just the latest of Republican governors, who after immediately taking office, has made it his mission to kneecap the unions. Republican Gov. Rick Snyder was not halfway through his first term when he signed a bill making Michigan the 24th right to work state in the nation. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has forged his anti-union alchemy into gold by cutting the collective bargaining rights of most of his state’s public unions and transforming himself into one of the current shiny objects among the potential 2016 Republican presidential nominee contenders.

Like Rauner, both Walker and Snyder asserted that their union body slams would mean more jobs for their states. So far, the reasons for Michigan’s modest job increases are debatable and Wisconsin’s job growth has been so slow that Walker grasped at one of the right wing’s threadbare straws blaming it on Obamacare.

Union jobs have always been considered “good jobs.” They have also been good for America. Whether it’s the 40-week, paid vacation, pensions, health insurance or higher wages, over the decades labor unions are directly and indirectly responsible for raising the standard of living for millions but cutting into the precious bottom lines of corporations as people and the people who over-reward themselves for running them. Labor unions also fail to endear themselves with Republicans by being important campaign contributors for the Democrats.

Unfortunately, for Black Americans, we find ourselves between the labor unions and a Republican place.

One out of every five working Blacks are government employees, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, When the Republican’s national obsession with austerity was running at fever pitch six years ago, governors across America reduced their state’s payroll through mass layoffs of state employees. African Americans, who are overwhelmingly Democrat, took a disproportionate hit, becoming the most fired and at risk of being the least rehired.

From the beginning of the Great Migration until now, it’s been a continuous struggle for African Americans in Chicago to get either contractors or the labor unions to cut them in on the action. When black skilled craftsmen, who had come from generations of bricklayers from the south, moved north, by edit, union bosses blocked them from working on the best jobs.

History has stubbornly repeated itself. Lilly-white trade unions have been as much a part of the wink and nod society as the boardrooms they take on. Both have been almost exclusively populated with white men. Both have been perfectly satisfied with that chummy arrangement for far too long.

Even now, too often when you see construction companies at work on big projects throughout Chicago, you don’t see a crew that looks like the residents of the city. Even with the implementation of set-aside programs, you don’t see big black construction firms getting their fair share of the jobs.

Of course all unions are not alike but the battle between the governor and the unions may not be an easy one for Blacks in Illinois to join. It may simply be a case of going with the devil we knew or the devil we’re getting to know.

February 04, 2015

So just when America’s richestof the rich was uncorking the champagne and gorging themselves on imported caviar, it looks like the Commander-in-Chief has declared that the Class War is on again.

The opening volley was fired 35 years ago with what George H.W. Bush accurately described as “voodoo economics.” Since then, this nation’s super wealthy have been getting super wealthier, much of the middle class has been getting poor and the poor have been getting super poor.

A study in October by economists, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, reported that the share of the total income earned by America’s top one percent at the end of 2012 was 22 percent. Back in the late ‘70s, before Reaganomics and it’s trickle down theory, the share of earnings by top one percent was less than 10 percent.

Sticking to his “a rising tide lifts all boats” manner of governing, there was little in President Barack Obama’s proposed annual budget that would pointedly give financially strapped Blacks much hope.

There was no direct budgetary lifeline to the 11.4 percent of African Americans nationwide who are still unemployed and nothing straight up for the 25 percent of Black Chicagoans who are also in that same boat, either.

And, once again, there is no targeted help from the man who assiduously stays in character as all the people’s president--so much so, that some might accuse the nation’s first Black head of household at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with periodically doing back flips to assure those Americans who suffer from negrophobia that he is not practicing negrophilia.

But while there was not enough in the president’s $4 trillion budget proposal to trigger right-winger’s whining about preferential treatment for Blacks and other “takers,” there was more than enough fair share tax proposals aimed at the “makers” for Republicans to pronounce it DOA.

Without openly saying that he really wants to spread the wealth, the president said, “I want to work with Congress to replace mindless austerity with smart investments that strengthen America.”

He also let Republicans know that he wanted to rebuild the nation’s crumbling infrastructure and that he did not want to spend more on financing the military-industrial complex unless conservatives were willing to spend more on domestic programs that repair rungs on the economic ladder and expand the safety networks for those who have fallen on hard times.

President Obama is shooting for a national debate on whether we should be growing our middle class or allowing our fat cats to get fatter.

Monday’s budget was aimed at kick-starting the debate. Items on President Obama’s wish list included calls for laying a tax on the banks too big to fail, raising of the capital gains tax, limiting of corporate tax deductions, imposing a new tax on inheritances and taxing of overseas profits held abroad.

Although it is ostensibly a budget for 2016, it is also a game plan for next year’s presidential and congressional elections, meant to serve as the playbook for a consistent message for all Democratic candidates. It’s a rerun of Bill Clinton’s successful message that “it’s the economy, stupid.”

As soon as the president released his blueprint, the conservative talking points flew into action fast and furious.

“We’re six years into the Obama economic policies, and he’s proposing more of the same, more tax increases that kill investment and jobs, and policies which are hardly aspirational,” said Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the GOP’s go-to guy on keeping it all for the Superrich. “I think the President is trying to do here is to, again, exploit envy economics. This top-down redistribution doesn’t work.”

“Like the president’s previous budgets, this plan never balances – ever,” said House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio). “It contains no solutions to address the drivers of our debt, and no plan to fix our entire tax code to help foster growth and create jobs.”

Echoed Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell: “What we saw this morning was another top-down, backward-looking document that caters to powerful political bosses on the Left and never balances — ever.”

Never ever allowing an opportunity to blame it on Obama, Republicans didn’t miss a beat.

According to a Pew Research Center’s report released in 2012, the average Black household wealth fell by more than half, to $5,677, while white household wealth fell 16 percent to $113, 149 between 2005 and 2009. That was during the Bush years, right before the Obama administration.

But the actual beginning the decline in Black household wealth meant nothing to Republican Donald Trump, who has not yet concluded that Obama was not born in Kenya.

“People are having a much lower income right now than when he took office. I mean, that to me is a really terrible statistic and if you happen to be African-American, it’s a total disaster. So what has President Obama done for African-Americans?” asked Trump. “Nothing.”

Obama's Careful Urban League Speech

The president kept his message all-inclusive at the civil rights group's annual convention.

(The Root) -- President Barack Obama walked a narrow line in his speech to the National Urban League convention in New Orleans Wednesday night, attempting to fire up his most enthusiastic base while giving his most rabid enemies as little ammo as possible to fire back at him.

It was no easy task. There has been some grumbling in the black community that the first African-American president was taking the last-hired and first-fired community for granted. That sentiment grew stronger this summer after Obama sent Vice President Joe Biden to address the National Association of Black Journalists and the NAACP. So Obama arrived in New Orleans for the annual Urban League meetup possibly fearing that African Americans might not show up in large enough numbers at the polling booths in November.

The president's speech to the venerable civil rights organization hit on the three most critical challenges in the black community -- violence, education and jobs -- while deftly managing to broaden the scope enough so that conservatives wouldn't have an easy shot at labeling his remarks as for blacks only.

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With the exception of announcing that, by executive order, he was establishing "the first ever White House initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans, so that every child has greater access to a complete and competitive education," the president's speech was pretty much all-American for all Americans.

The POTUS ticked off measures his administration has done to help black students, such as increasing Pell Grants and pushing colleges and universities to cut their costs. But imbedded in those boasts was an unspoken truth: This is good for the rest of our fellow citizens, too.

The same tactic was employed for jobs. "We don't believe government should be in the business of helping people that refuse to help themselves, and we recognize that not every government program works," Obama said. "But we do expect hard work to pay off. We do expect responsibility to be rewarded. We do expect that if you put in enough effort you should be able to find a job that pays off."

Obama also deftly merged the Urban League's mission of equal opportunity into values of the middle class, where prosperity should be broad-based. But in speaking about the tragedies brought on by the senseless deaths from gun violence Obama really integrated his message. "Violence plagues the biggest cities but it also plagues the smallest town," he said. "It claims the lives of Americans of different ages and different races, and it's tied together by the fact that these young people had dreams and had futures that were cut tragically short."

The president spoke of praying for the victims of the massacre in Aurora, Colo.: "We also pray for those who succumb to less publicized acts of violence that plague our communities in so many cities across the country every day. We can't forget about that." Obama's sleight of hand was not just a black-and-white narrative. He delicately drilled deeper into the gun-violence plague without once mentioning gun control.

"I also believe, like other Americans, that AK-47s belong on the battlefield of war, not on the streets of our cities," he said. Then he went on to say he was going to talk to members of the House and Senate to seek "a consensus around violence reduction." That was another hidden message. I read it as this: "We all know all this gun violence is insane, but I can't afford to rile up the gun nuts right now. I've got an election to win."

Cyber columnist Monroe Anderson is a veteran Chicago journalist who has written signed op-ed-page columns for both the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times and executive-produced and hosted his own local CBS TV show. He was also the editor of Savoy Magazine. Follow him on Twitter.

June 29, 2012

While attending the National Association of Black Journalists convention last week in New Orleans, I came up with an idea as to how the Obama Administration could help us understand the historic health care law. I wrote a column about it for The Root website.

'Obamacare,' the Video Game?

This writer says that the repacking of the president's accomplishments would keep his message in play.

By: Monroe Anderson | Posted: June 29, 2012 at 12:48 AM

(The Root) -- The Saturday before the 2010 November midterm elections, President Obama's campaign strategist David Axelrod was a call-in guest on a radio show I was co-hosting. Team Obama was already bracing for a shellacking, since for months one Republican after the next had lip-synched right-wing talking points, accusing the POTUS of having accomplished zip.

I knew the Republicans were playing fast and loose with the truth. I knew that, like it or not, in his first two years in office, Barack Obama had scratched more off his to-do list than any other U.S. president since Lyndon Baines Johnson.

So I asked Axelrod why so many voters were so clueless as to how President Obama had spent the first two years of his first term. I dare not try to reconstruct the entire answer from the president's then senior adviser, but I will repeat two words that jumped out at me: "Information gridlock."

That's right. Axelrod's defense for a failure to communicate was that Obama's accomplishments came at such a breakneck pace that the White House press office didn't have the time to make sure that everyone following could keep up with the score. Maybe. Maybe not. But it would seem that the one achievement that is the most momentous since LBJ pushed Medicare and Medicaid through Congress in 1965 might have gotten a little special treatment: the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare.

It hasn't helped that from its conception through passage until now, the right-wing echo chamber has been in superdrive, dogging and demonizing the president's health care law. But I've got an app for that: Obamacare the Game.

Rather than trying to run down all the complicated bennies and perks hidden in the 2,600-page law, a computer game would have players racing through level after level, virtually discovering the rewards or penalties for either being or not being enrolled in the health plan.

It wouldn't matter whether it was a strategy, simulation or role-playing game, as long as it was available for a free download on the Obama-campaign website for every system from iPad to Xbox to desktop -- Facebook, too. The gamification of the president's historic accomplishment could quickly and easily be a mind changer, slaying the stream of poison that the right keeps spewing. With the flick of a click, Americans would be able to go from unenlightened and turned off to informed and engaged.

How to beat the right-wing smear-and-fear machine came to me while I was in "The Gamification of News" session at the National Association of Black Journalists' convention last week. Although the panel was focused on a cutting-edge tactic for engaging readers and viewers in complex news stories, my mind quickly leaped from there to politics.

Since then I have interviewed two of the gamification panelists, Manuel "Mani" Saint-Victor and Scott Anderson, to see what they thought. They both agreed that it could be done and suggested how to do it.

"Have people walk through the process of being a different person with a different illness -- [the] Sim [City] approach," said Saint-Victor, who is a former psychiatry resident physician at Miami's Jackson Memorial Hospital and a founder of Marveloper Media. "Let them walk through and let them see it with the Obamacare version and without the Obamacare version, not telling them which is and which isn't."

Scott Anderson, who is my firstborn as well as the co-founder and lead programmer at Enemy Airship and one of Game Developer Magazine's top 50 game developers for 2009, had a similar idea. He thinks the game should be "how to survive without health insurance." In his version of Obamacare the Game, "You have all these setbacks, and you have all these crazy things people will have to do to survive," Scott said. "It might not be fun, but it'll be effective. People will say, 'Oh, wow'; if these things happened to me, I'd be screwed."

Although gamification hasn't come to politics in a big way yet, it is already being played out in advertising through reward cards and loyalty systems, Saint-Victor said. Of course, almost everybody is familiar with the SimCity games, and there's even a game called Cut Throat Capitalism, which explores the economics of Somali pirates and why they do what they do. "You basically pick what ships they go after and how you'll treat the hostages," Anderson said.

The Supreme Court may have upheld the individual mandate on Thursday, but hold up on the high fives. Just how badly the Obama administration and campaign need to get beyond the information gridlock is patently obvious.

A majority of Americans -- 54 percent -- still believe that Obamacare should be repealed. Republicans have spent three times more money bad-mouthing the president's health law than Democrats have spent explaining it. Right now there are 3 million small-business people who qualify for a health care tax credit.

A mere 170,000 have applied.

Cyber columnist Monroe Anderson is a veteran Chicago journalist who has written signed op-ed-page columns for both the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times and executive-produced and hosted his own local CBS TV show. He was also the editor of Savoy Magazine. Follow him on Twitter.

September 07, 2011

On the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 tragedy, the Chicago Sun-Times assigned all its Sunday op-ed columnists to write on the subject. Below is what I wrote. I've cut and pasted it from a wingnut website, Free Republic. If you'll notice, I got honored with a very grown-up "Barf Alert."

Well, five years have passed. We're Bush-free but still stuck in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We're also still afraid.

We can't catch a flight without going shoeless first and we're more than likely to have to show our private parts to a TSA agent before we're allowed to board. Osama bin Laden is dead but his terror lives on. So does his toll on American freedom and finances. We've spent ourselves into a hole by occupying two countries in our pursuit of invisible men. While we've been blowing things up for the past decade, China has been building and building and building.

We're still stuck in the quagmire with President Obama afraid to pull the plug, rightly fearing that the Republicans will successfully label him our soft on terror, anti-American, pro-Arab, freedom-hating commander-in-chief.

Ten years after 9/11, we're still nation-building in the Middle East while the Midwest in our nation is falling apart. So, for this next presidential election, I think Obama should be making a 911 call for America--we need the emergency services.

Five years after the 9/11 tragedy, the kingpin of Abraham Lincoln's party is still dead set on fooling most of the people most of the time.

President Bush and his chorus of Republican pols, Cabinet members and neo-con sycophants would have us believe we're safer or, depending on political expediencies, not that safe. According to the president's pre-9/11 anniversary speeches on the progress of the war on terror, we're safer than we were before the attacks but not yet safe enough to steer clear of his failed stay-the-course strategy. As Bush explains it, al-Qaida's leadership is decimated but remains dangerous enough to destroy the entire civilized world.

There he goes again.

With midterm congressional elections less than two months away, the Bush subterfuge machine is in full spiel and spin. Too incompetent to manage problems that are all too real to mainstream America, such as high gas prices, 45 million citizens without health insurance and a sliding income for middle-class workers -- or capturing Osama bin Laden for that matter -- the president and his forces are back to wheeling and dealing terror. They're playing the same fear-mongering three-card monte game that worked so well in the 2002 and 2004 elections: See if you can find the terrorist threat under here or here or there. Find Saddam Hussein's ethereal weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Watch the politically timed color alert rise and fall on cue.

There's a book just out with a title that sums it all up: Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal and the Selling of the Iraq War. Authors Michael Isikoff and David Corn report that Bush hated Saddam so much that he privately let loose expletive-laden tirades against the dictator. In March 2002, months before Bush asked Congress for authority to attack Saddam, he bluntly exposed his true intentions in an unguarded moment with two aides. When told that White House correspondent Helen Thomas was questioning the need to oust Saddam, Bush snapped: ''Did you tell her I intend to kick his sorry m - - - - - - - - - - - - ass all over the Mideast?''

The president's anger was understandable. ''After all,'' Bush said six months later while speaking at a fund-raiser in Houston, ''this is the guy who tried to kill my dad.''

I think that's admirable that Bush 43 loves his dad, Bush 41, enough to try to revenge Saddam's botched assassination attempt in 1993. I loved my late dad as much as Bush loves his, and while I too would have been livid if the Iraqi dictator tried to whack my father, I wouldn't have set into motion a wave of international shock and awe that would result in the deaths of more than 2,600 U.S. military men and women and more than 41,000 innocent Iraqi civilians.

I also love my two sons as much as I'm sure he loves his twin daughters. If we're really in danger of Apocalypse Soon, as Bush keeps insisting, then we ought to act like it. The president should re-institute a mandatory military draft. I'll tearfully send my sons off to war, right after Bush tearfully sends his daughters to sign up in our co-educational military. If the war against Islamic terrorists compares to the fight against Nazis, as Bush insists, and if a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq would lead to its conquest by our nation's worst enemies, then we ought to have a military reflecting that clear and present danger. There were 16 million Americans fighting to keep the world safe for democracy in World War II. There are 130,000 in Iraq.

I'm afraid Bush's plan to save the world from Islamic fascism is way too modest. He wants Congress to pass his terrorist surveillance act and authorization to try the al-Qaida detainees held in his secret CIA torture prisons. For reasons too simple for many Americans to understand, he's not interested in following the 9/11 Commission's recommendations to shore up security at U.S. harbors or keep a close watch on checked airplane luggage. Those measures, which would obviously make America safer from the inevitable al-Qaida strikes in the future, would cost big business big money.

But what fool would want to take those measures when it's so much more politically practical to scare most of the people one more time?

You may remember General Platt from American Idol when he performed "Pants on the Ground," a whamit, bamit, cut-it-out damnit song about young men wearing baggy, saggy pants.

And, of course, Wannabe New York Governor Jimmy McMillan of the Rent is Too Damn High Party is the media story du jour after yesterday's gubernatorial candidate debate.

If I had my show, the three of us could talk politics and culture. We could talk about how the war on drugs and the outsourcing of unskilled jobs have produced a guns and drugs commerce in the nation's inner-cities that has led to a prison culture in America from inner-city to suburb to farmland to the world.

After that, the three of us could discuss how Reaganomics and deregulation has led to the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. Of course, I'd drop in the fact that the CEO compensation ratio to worker was 24 to 1 in 1965 while today it's 300 to 1, therefore highlighting one reason the rent's definitely too damn high.

Unfortunately, I no longer have a TV show, so I'll just have to have Platt and McMillan as my guests right here, right now.